Entrepreneurship as a Cure for Violence

I-CAMP is a program to teach young people entrepreneurial skills such as computer programming. I-CAMP stands for Intrinsic, Community, Autonomy, Mastery and Purpose, which are fundamental elements for building wealth and health. According to Michelle Alexander, author of The New Jim Crow:

If you take into account prisoners, a large majority of African American men in some urban areas, like Chicago, have been labeled felons for life. These men are part of a growing undercaste — not class, caste – a group of people who are permanently relegated, by law, to an inferior second-class status. They can be denied the right to vote, automatically excluded from juries, and legally discriminated against in employment, housing, access to education, and public benefits — much as their grandparents and great-grandparents once were during the Jim Crow era.

Innovation Requires Empathy and Faith

For several years Peter Denning, co-author of The Innovator’s Way, has been puzzling over why it seems that our innovation adoption rates are low even though our idea production rates are high. The overall success rate of innovation initiatives in business is around 4%. Yet many businesses report that they have too many ideas and waste precious time and resources struggling to select the ones most likely to succeed and then work them through to adoption. We are idea rich, selection baffled, and adoption poor.

From a Forbes article by Steve Denning we learn that a magisterial study by Deloitte’s Center for the Edge shows the rates of return on assets and on invested capital for 20,000 US firms from 1965 to 2011. It shows that “managerialism” has been steadily failing for the last half century.

The graphic shows that something has gone so terribly wrong with the US private sector—the supposed engine of economic growth and the supposed creators of jobs. When the best firms have rates of return on assets or on invested capital of, on average, just over one percent, we have a management catastrophe on our hands.

Don’t Let Wall Street Takeover Education

Screening of Brooklyn Castle

Wednesday, October 16 at 7:30pm

MIST Harlem

46 West 116th Street

After the screening there will be a panel discussion featuring Junior Open Champion Justus Williams, Director/Producer Katie Dellamaggiore, Georgios Alexopoulos, and Nadya Ortiz. They will discuss Wall Street, Charter Schools, and Chess.

For tickets (click here)

We R In Need Of A Musical Revolution

Concert for 100% Free Health Care
May 2014
At the World Famous Apollo Theater

Lester Chambers and his son Dylan will be performing. Lester’s new album Lester Chambers Time Has Come, now available for purchase at lester-chambers.com. A portion of proceeds go to Sweet Relief!

Lester (right) and Dylan Chambers

Jon Bibbs (JonBibbs.com @JonBibbs)

Honorary Chairman cancer survivor Andrew Shapter

Director, film maker and photographer Andrew Shapter is the creative force behind the critically acclaimed documentary “Before the Music Dies”. The film, which profiles artists like Erykah Badu, The Roots, Eric Clapton, Dave Matthews and Branford Marsalis, was inspired by the need to give musicians a voice in an industry dominated by a pop music influence. The documentary opened up a channel of conversation about the commercialization of the art of music.

Andrew Shapter

[T]he present political chaos is connected with the decay of language, and that one can probably bring about some improvement by starting at the verbal end. If you simplify your English, you are freed from the worst follies of orthodoxy. ~ George Orwell

Eric Arthur Blair , known by his pen name George Orwell, was an English novelist and journalist. His work is marked by clarity, intelligence and wit, awareness of social injustice, opposition to totalitarianism, and commitment to democratic socialism.

Lester Chambers at The Apollo Theater

Lester Chambers (right) on stage with his son Dylan

Lester Chambers and his son Dylan will be performing at the Concert for 100% Free Health Care

Lester’s new album Lester Chambers Time Has Come, now available for purchase at lester-chambers.com. A portion of proceeds go to Sweet Relief!

Lester was the lead singer of the 1960s soul rock group The Chambers Brothers, who had the hit single, “Time Has Come Today.” The song spent five weeks at No. 11 on the Billboard Hot 100 in the fall of 1968, it is considered one of the landmark rock songs of the psychedelic era.

Concert for 100% Free Health Care

May 2014

At the World Famous Apollo Theater

According to a Daily News article, “Another unhealthy year for Harlem:”

• Central Harlem had the highest death rate of any community in the city with 8.8 deaths per 1,000 people in 2009, compared with 6.1 deaths per 1,000 people citywide.
• East Harlem ranked third in the city with a rate of 8.3 deaths per 1,000 people.

According to another report by the Citizens’ Committee for Children of New York, the child poverty rate is 35.8% for Central Harlem and 44.2% for East Harlem. Compared to city-wide of 30.0% and 22.1% for Manhattan.

The human right to health means that everyone has the right to the highest attainable standard of physical and mental health, which includes access to all medical services, sanitation, adequate food, decent housing, healthy working conditions, and a clean environment.

On “The Opinion Pages” of The New York Times, David Himmelstein and Steffie Woolhandler write about the benefits of a single payer system:

A single-payer reform — a public, national health insurance plan that pays virtually all medical bills — would fix the health care mess; and, like Medicare, it’s clearly constitutional. Single-payer would save $400 billion wasted each year on insurers’ overhead and the paperwork burden they impose on doctors and hospitals.

Himmelstein and Woolhandler are internists and professors of public health at the City University of New York. They are co-founders of Physicians for a National Health Program.

Screening of Brooklyn Castle

Wednesday, October 16 at 7:30pm

MIST Harlem

46 West 116^th Street

Meet US Junior Open Champion Justus Williams

More information and tickets (click here)

FIDE Master Georgios Alexopoulos

FIDE Master Georgios “George” Alexopoulos working with Ibrahem Sanchez.

FIDE Master Georgios Alexopoulos or “George” agrees with former Chess World Champion Vasily Smyslov that:

Like any human activity chess has two origins: the divine and the devilish. Chess as an art has a divine origin, while chess as a sport (when victory counts at all costs sacrificing the beauty of the game), springs from Devil.

Current chess training is dominated by computer databases and computer analysis. George believes that this has created a generation of chess players who lack some basic understanding of the principles of chess. Smyslov:

After all, a computer is nothing if not the Devil because it does not create anything. It is an inspector, or more precisely an accuser…. Any attempt to compose the entire game by computer negates the creative (divine) side of chess.

Get a free chess lesson from George

Every Wednesday 3:00-4:30pm

HOPE Community Service
50 Washington Avenue
New Rochelle, NY 10801
(Click here for Google Map)

George has been playing chess since he was about three and half years old. By the time he was about six years old he started to play in scholastic tournaments and Junior championships. He was coached by one of the greatest Greek players ever, the legendary International Master Triantafyllos Siaperas.

Since the 1980s he has been rated and ranked by USCF (United States Chess Federation) as a National Master, Lifemaster and Senior Master. Since the 1990s he had been rated and ranked by USCF (United States Chess Federation) as an Original Lifemaster and a “Senior Star Lifemaster” (under their previous system of Lifetime Title Norms).

George has participated in over four hundred major National and International tournaments in two continents (Europe and North America) and twelve countries (United States, Greece, Canada, England, Switzerland, Holland, Hungary, Romania, Yugoslavia, Bulgaria, Germany and Italy).

Effective Marketing In the 21st Century

Overwhelming clutter has made traditional advertising almost worthless for your business. We live in a world that has become ad rich but idea poor. Your customers don’t want to be bombarded with ads—they want to be inspired by ideas that will change their lives. Ads may create transactions, but great ideas create transformations. Ads reflect our culture, ideas imagine our future.

Paul MacLean’s “Triune Brain” theory, whose basic idea is that every human brain contains three independent competing minds – the reptile, the early mammal, and the modern primate.

One of the biggest problems with traditional advertising is that it mainly engages the “lizard brain.” Whether you know it or not, we all have what Seth Godin refers to as a lizard brain. He says, “The lizard is a physical part of your brain, the pre-historic lump called the amygdala near the brain stem that is responsible for fear and rage and reproductive drive.”

“The lizard brain is hungry, scared, angry, and horny.”

“The lizard brain only wants to eat and be safe.”

Godin writes in The Icarus Deception:

[T]he lizard brain is the resistance. The resistance is the voice in the back of our head telling us to back off, be careful, go slow, compromise. The resistance is writer’s block and putting jitters and every project that ever shipped late because people couldn’t stay on the same page long enough to get something out the door. The resistance grows in strength as we get closer to shipping, as we get closer to an insight, as we get closer to the truth of what we really want. That’s because the lizard hates change and achievement and risk.

The Hypocrisy of Garry Kasparov

“You hypocrite, first take the log out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to take the speck out of your brother’s eye.” ~ Matthew 7:5

Garry Kasparov and Eva Moskowitz at the Success Academy in Harlem

Chairman of the Human Rights Foundation and Former Chess World Champion Garry Kasparov recently evoke Nelson Mandela in addressing the sentence of opposition leader Alexei Navalny:

It is symbolic that it came on the 95th birthday of Nelson Mandela, likely the most famous political prisoner of the 20th century. He was jailed for 27 years. Navalny’s sentence was for five years, but we all know he will be in jail until Putin falls, and that he won’t be free a moment before that or jailed a moment after that.

Kasparov freely and often talks about the corruption and oppression of the Putin regime in Russia but seems to have no problem promoting and supporting the oppression and corruption of the 1% in the United States. One recent example is Kasparov’s visit to the Success Academy charter school in Harlem, New York.

The Board of Directors for the Success Academy includes many hedge fund-managers such as Joel Greenblatt, John Petry, Jay Bryant, Steven M. Galbraith, Kevin Hall, W. Yen Liow, Daniel S. Loeb, Richard S. Pzena, and John H. Scully. Wall Street is looking to privatize America’s public schools. Using a number of policy schemes including school vouchers and for-profit charter schools, the education privatization movement seeks to take over America’s largely public K-12 education system and put it in the hands of some of the very same people who caused the financial crash on Wall Street. Kasparov seems to have no problem with these plans.